During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging dominant benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a bold, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who could see how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging film which avoided typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he returned to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
